adventures in colouring outside the lines

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shoes

I’ve lost my way a bit with my training for the Walk In Her Shoes challenge this year. In previous years I’d set myself a gradually increasing step target in the weeks leading up to the challenge and do everything I could to make sure I met those goals, even though the only goal that counted was the one in the week of the challenge.

This year I’ve been distracted and it hasn’t felt so pressing that I meet my training goals. But despite this, I know that I will do everything in my power to meet my 20,000 step goal in the 8-14 March week. It will happen.

(If you’re a reader of Gretchen Rubin’s blog you might have figured out by now that I have a pretty strong “obliger” tendency, which means that I’m good at meeting commitments I make when I have external accountability, but struggle to meet commitments I make to myself. You can throw in a dose of “questioner” in there too.)

After a week where I met my 12,000 step goal every day except for the day I missed it by 795 steps, last week I met my 15,000 step goal on exactly one day. Three days out of seven last week I didn’t even get to 10,000 steps.

Less-judgmental me is ok with this, even though competitive me is waving frantically and trying to get me to feel bad about “failing”. I’m ignoring her. Circumstances beyond my control, and my response to that, require a gentler approach.

In other news, I’m very happy to have reached my fundraising goal for this year. Thank you so much to everyone who has sponsored me. I appreciate your generosity and your encouragement. I won’t let you down!

Zoe and five of the other teddies came with us, and they had a great time too. Yesterday Kramstable (aka Juniordwarf) told me that Zoe would be spending the whole week with me.

So today’s 12 of 12 is “Things Zoe did today”.

1 of 12 – Zoe on the bus with me and Kramstable.

1 of 12 – Zoe on the bus

2 of 12 – After two weeks away I had no coffee either at home or at work. This required urgent rectification.

2 of 12 – Coffee

3 of 12 – We also needed some cash.

3 of 12 – Cash

4 of 12 – Kramstable said that I’d do half the typing I needed to do today and Zoe would do the other half.

4 of 12 – Typing

5 of 12 – Last time I took Zoe in to work and she watched the building site, she (a) got photographed looking out the window by someone on the street outside and (b) got left behind overnight. Kramstable was very insistent that she not get left at work again.

5 of 12 – Watching

6 of 12 – My driver licence expires tomorrow. When we were organising the rental car in Christchurch, the guy asked me if I knew when it expired. Yes haha. I thought I’d better do something about that today.

6 of 12 – Service Tasmania

7 of 12 – We picked up some sourdough bread from Pigeon Whole in Argyle Street. This is the Best Bread Ever.

7 of 12 – Bread

8 of 12 – Zoe tried on some shoes at Faulls. (I didn’t.) They were a bit big.

8 of 12 – Shoes

9 of 12 – We looked at some notebooks at Fullers. We didn’t buy any. (Somewhere along the line she lost one of her hair ties.)

9 of 12 – Notebooks

10 of 12 – Zoe did some photocopying and scanning for me.

10 of 12 – Photocopying

11 of 12 – I had a couple of computer problems. Our system conveniently got upgraded while I was away and not everything worked, so Zoe called the IT Helpdesk for me.

This week started off as part of a five-day weekend. I had a day of leave on Friday, a weekend, a public holiday on Monday and then another day off on Tuesday.

On Monday Juniordwarf and I filled in for a presenter who’s taking some time off, at our community radio station TYGA FM on Monday’s midday show, The Time Tunnel. This is a show that features music from a particular year. We looked at 1981 and played Australian music for Australia Day.

TYGA FM

Juniordwarf was very excited that we were going to have another day together on Tuesday. I was excited too. We hadn’t had a lot of time together these holidays, so it’s been great to have a few days where it’s just him and me doing pretty much whatever he wants to do.

It was a really relaxing break. We didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything apart from the radio show. It was good just to be at home and potter around and spend some time together. It made me miss the days before school started when I’d have a day (or two days before he started kinder) at home with Juniordwarf and I actually felt like a proper mum, instead of someone racing between home, school, work, school and home every day, with hardly a second to take a breath in between.

Sadly, it had to end, and I went back to work on Wednesday.

I’ve kept up with my walking in the mornings and I’m trying to adjust my wakeup time to be able to do the walk I want to do and still give myself time to be ready at the time we need to leave.

The most interesting thing that happened was that our new chickens, which we got at New Year, have finally started getting up onto the perches in the chook house by themselves at night.

One of the new chickens

Oh, and I got another strawberry from my strawberry plant. Yay!

We saw this bird in the garden on Saturday (dodgy photo because I took it through the kitchen window on maximum zoom).

Bird in our garden

This was an interesting ‘uncover’ on the main street I noticed during the week. When we first moved here, this shop was called Cooper’s and it was a hardware store. It was most recently True Blue, which had been a real estate agency as well as a removalist service and a ‘bits & pieces’ store. It closed down at the end of last year and is now a store selling local hand-made crafts – but as they’re doing it up, the old Cooper’s awning was uncovered.

Now I’ll let you into a little secret. Officially I was trying to walk 20,000 steps each day, but my competitive mind had other plans in store for me and it wanted me to do 25,000.

Thanks competitive mind.

So how did I do? Here are the final numbers:

Monday: 27,655

Tuesday: 26,483

Wednesday: 25,122

Thursday: 26,183

Friday: 25,795

Saturday: 30,018

Sunday: 21,958

The 5 am starts every day were hard, but it was a good way to get in some exercise that I wouldn’t have had time to do at any other time of the day. It also meant that I didn’t have to walk for as long in the evenings to reach my daily step goal. In the past I’ve been reluctant to go for a walk after dinner because I always seem to have stuff to do, and going for a walk takes up too much before-bed time. (That was my excuse not to exercise. I’m very good at making these excuses.)

Ahh, priorities.

Saturday was an interesting day. I’d planned – and was happy – to spend most of the day preparing my feast for the Tassivore Eat Local Challenge, so I knew I had to get as much walking done as possible in the morning. I set myself a target of a 2 hour walk to see how far I could get. As I’d just missed 10 km on Tuesday, I really wanted to at least do that and see how I felt.

I ended up walking 12 km in just over 2 hours, and it took me an hour and 48 minutes to get to 10 km.

I’m not sure of the exact step count, but it was over 16,000. I’m not sure I ever want to do that again.

The rest of Saturday’s steps came from being on my feet all day and night, and by the end of what was a late night, I was exhausted. When the alarm went off at 5 am on Sunday, my body said no, and went straight back to sleep.

I felt pretty ordinary on Sunday morning and I could feel the beginning of a cold coming on. I think I might have just pushed myself a bit too far, so my walks were fairly gentle recovery walks. There was no way I was going to let myself get through six days of this challenge and fail on the very last day, but I can tell you I was hanging out for that little 20,000 step buzz on my Fitbit with every step I took.

As soon as I hit 20,000 I collapsed onto the couch and did very little for the rest of the day.

The challenge for me now is to maintain some of the momentum (not quite this much) and not fall back into my old non-exercising ways. I’m not off to a good start this week, but I promised myself some new shoes to replace these 8 year-old shoes, which are starting to show (and feel) signs of their age, if I succeeded in the 20,000 steps challenge, so maybe that will inspire me to keep going.

I say apparently, because this morning when I got up at stupid o’clock to get ready for work I couldn’t find any of them. Not a single pair of work pants. Out of three pairs!

I could have worn a skirt instead . . .

. . . not bloody likely!

So I wore jeans.

I keep my rather flash shoes with the highest heels I own at work because I’m never going to wear them at home. So when I got to work I put them on to show that I wasn’t doing Casual Friday on a Monday.

I’m not sure that the hole in my jeans went any way to convincing anyone of this.

Yesterday I was on my way to an appointment and was a bit early so I popped into a store to browse, and ended up coming out with a pair of purple shoes.

As you do.

I’m not really a shoe girl. My shoe wardrobe consists of many casual jogger type shoes, a couple of pairs of years-old work shoes, a couple of pairs of years-old dressy shoes, some boots and my ugg boots.

I want some pink shoes but haven’t seen any that I really like, so the search for those continues. In the mean time I have my shiny new purple ones to add a slight hint of colour to my shoe selection.

But as I was editing the photo tonight, I was thinking how fantastic it would be to have Dorothy’s ruby slippers.